Malofiej 2013 – Quality of Speaking

THE MALOFIEJ has taken place in Pamplona once more. The weather was awful – just like at home – and not the sunny early Pamplona-spring, we’ve grown accumstomed to.

Luckily we’re not there for the weather – we return every year for the interesting summit and all the networking opportunities, that really makes this conference something special.

A few things could be changed to make the experience better, (the award-show for one) but overall it’s still the best place to be, if you want inspiration and friendship in the infographic community.

This year saw an impressive line-up of speakers with a lot of interesting things to show and talk about. The line-up included both some speakers, who I’ve been interested to hear for quite some time – and some speakers I didn’t know beforehand, but who made a really good impression.

In the Danish group of attendees, we meet each day to discuss the sessions – what did you get from this? – do you agree on that? and so on. We also rate the presenters with a number between 0 and 10 depending on how good the session was and how much we’ve got from it.

By doing so, we create a nice little data-set to play with – and while it’s partly an exercise it’s also a way to get the ball rolling on the responsibility of the presenters. They really have the power to make or break a conference, and should always come well-prepared and ready to deliver.

(The visualization to accompany this text is inspired by the work done by Nicholas Felton and the important point made by Fernanda Viégas about how complexity tells the story better than an averaged-out dataset.)